THE. ART GALLE.RIE.S War and the Artist W AR, these days, is a big word, ugly, dangerous, insistent, and it keeps growing uglier, more dangerous, and more insistent hourly. l\t10reover, as it grows, it becomes broad- er and darker in significance; like a storm cloud that spreads till its edges are lost beyond the horizon, its meaning now seems to reach out and cover everything. When did this war start, anyway? On December 7th, wIth the at- tack on Pearl Harbor? But that was just the event that got us actively into the con- flict. Did it start with the German invasion of Poland? Before that there were l\t1u- nich and Czecho-Slovakia; h "0 O d "0 t ere were InCI ents In l\t1anch ukuo and China; there was a war in Spain. There were a man named Hjtler and another named M ussolini, a revolution in Russia and a world de- pression. To those who believe that wars have a background in economics, it sometimes seems that the first World War never stopped and the great ct:ash of 1929 was one of the major actions in the struggle. I bring all this up in connection with the hig new show of American etchings, lithographs, and other prints at the Whitney l\t1 useum, in an effort to sug- gest why I found the exhibit so disap- pointing. "Between Two Wars," it is called, and I am not quarrelling with the title; dates are arbitrary things, and since the range of the exhibition is from 1 914 to 1 941 , it seems reasonable enough, if only for the dramatic effect obtained, to use the two war declara- tions as signposts at the ends. There can be little complaint, either, about the technical quality of the work, for of the two hundred and sixty-odd items the majority are in this respect unexception- able. What I do object to is the tone of the show as a whole as set by the subjects selected; this is so mealy-mouthed and "polite" in character as to give what seems to me a totally false idea of the period under survey. For if American artists, and especial- ly printmakers, were doing anything throughout those years, they were pro- testing not politely and often violently, and though a good deal of theIr protests were awkward in style, they were aimed, we see now, at errors and evils that were to prove of paramount im- portance in shaping the things to come. Furthermore, there were some among these men who succeeded in raising their protests to the level of high artistic state- ment. I am thinking of such people as William Gropper, with his biting polit- ical commentaries, and Reginald Marsh, with his burlesque-sho'-"T and Bowery ironies, as well as Louis Lozowick, Elizabeth Olds, and others- artists who, though dissimilar in manner and method, still managed collectively to lift printmaking from the dreary round of the merely quaint and the picturesque into which it had fallen at the start of the century and give it a vigor and immediacy that it had not possessed sin ce th e days 0 f Daumier. Theirs, I think, was one of the prin- cipal artistic contributions of our times, and this show missed its main chance when it failed to portray their accom- plishmen t adequately. To be sure, all the artists I've mentioned are includ- ed in the exhibition. But with the exception 0 f Gropper, whose "F 0 r the Record" is one of the best of his congressional studies, they are mainly represented by un typical examples. l\t1arsh's "Steeplechase" is far from his best, while Elizabeth Olds, who can pic- ture men and machines with a vividness few others can equal, has a quite incon- sequential color print called "Merry- Go- Round. " For the rest, there are a delicately handled little cityscape by ] erome Myers called "On Oak St.," a sparkling early John Sloan etching called "Night Windows," and the big, o " D . M dh " b grIm ance In a a. ouse y George Bellows, all worthy of note. Among the work by younger men, I liked best] ames McConnell's fine color print called "Street Corner" and Dew- ey Albinson's clean, spacious lithograph, "Sheep Ranch, Montana." In view of its size and scope, the show is, of course, worth seeing. But as a survey of a pe- riod, and particularly of the artists' re- actions to the events of that period, it falls far short of the mark. W AR figures in another exhibition this week, or at least flickers around its edges. At the Pierre Matisse, under the heading "Artists in Exile," they are showing works by twelve paint- ers and two sculptors, all formerly of the School of Paris and now here for the duration. I found the show curiously 69 : . .\'Î .:. . .\' , '::' ..''' , ""\" \. \" ..,}\{ t.' " '",', ,;" , ,, . "; ',:">"''',' :{, , :,' ,,' f -. '-\:.\.,. . . \. ,"' '\: '. '" 'I!I , 1 1Jo' ,..' : ,.\ 't. \;, : ',':Z\, . \ Jo. ,'; ':.. -};:.: . ,::' :' . . . ....$ ,"., ",..,}j,,:' >, . _.... .:_....-. t";... 'i . :i \ , .f ' , .. . "i:'- " t',_ ._ .\f> \ ... -. - i ri ':\'.. t::' ...:.. .;,L .- . .', '\ò',\ . > , ,if \ """';, ' ' .. "t. .. ..I'", ;"\ . : :-. : . :.;:' " ... þ. ....... ',;0. . " . _..,.,,' . ,>>;.),. ," ..q''':'' f\ ..' t.r' ., :.' 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